The Parent/Teacher Conference Plays

Here's the difference between a blog and a review: here, I'm just going to tell you that I give this show a giant A+, on account of Clay MacLeod Chapman's Rugrats, the brilliant site-specific work, and the fact that there are two other excitingly different one-acts on the bill. If you click the link below, I'll tell you more about them, but as this show closes in three days, it's easier to just stress up front that you're never going to have a better reason to go back to school.

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Three Changes

Reviewed for Theater News Online.

Bedbugs!

photo: Quinn Batson

This ridiculously enjoyable pop-rock sci-fi musical, in which an uptight lady exterminator's custom-made spray accidentally turns the city's bedbugs into giant rock singing man-eaters bent on world domination, is the kind of cheesy silliness that has so often been done badly in the past that it's a wonderful shock to see it done so well. The score (music by Paul Leschen, lyrics by bookwriter Fred Sauter) satirizes power-pop ballads and old school hair-band rock anthems while still delivering their pleasures - as performed by Chris Hall (every bit the rock icon as the king of the bugs), Celina Carvajal (a vocal powerhouse as the lady bug killer turned bug lover), and especially Brian Charles Rooney (in drag and brilliantly sending up a pop superstar named - one guess who this is based on - Salon Dionne) the songs are a goofy arena-rock blast. Top to bottom everyone in the ensemble is with the spirit of the material; I haven't had as much what-a-goof, laugh-out-loud fun at a campy musical since the first time I saw Rocky Horror.

Southern Promises

Photo/Ryan Jensen

Slavery is wrong, period, a simple truth that will surprise no-one in the educated crowd at PS122. What will surprise them--especially given the emphatic and broad strokes of Thomas Bradshaw's writing--is how strongly the acknowledgment of such a vast moral wrong can still impact them. Stereotypically evil slaveholders take care of the graphic rapes and abuses even as their satirically hypocritical lines give way to the darkest comedy, but what's important to focus on is the depth of the victims, married house slaves Benjamin (Erwin E. A. Thomas) and Charlotte (Sadrina Johnson), who we suffer vicariously through. Along with director Jose Zayas, these actors capture a subtle explicitness that make the deep sorrow reflected in their eyes more graphic than their own physical degradation. Save for one misstep in which Benjamin dreams of being the master (which tarnishes his suffering), Southern Promises is a fine work of evocative theater. That it is not harder to watch says something more about the audience than it does about the highly capable cast and crew, who have created a lingering mood that sends aftershocks long after the curtain call.


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The Hatpin

photo: Danielle Lyonne

The plot of this Australian musical (performing at NYMF) may be based on true crime events, but it's Gothic soap opera: your tear ducts prepare for a workout as soon as the penniless unwed mom - circa 1892 - hands over her bastard infant to a respectable family near the top of the first act. It's entirely predictable and overheated but it undeniably gets its job done, partly thanks to the lean effectiveness of the book and the pleasures of the accomplished, often lilting score. The csst is uniformly excellent but Caroline O'Connor, playing a fruit merchant who befriends and shelters the vilified mom, is especially captivating.

Love, Jerry

Reviewed for Theatermania.